Spyware & Parasites

Affiliate marketing parasitism

Affiliate Marketing Parasitism and Activities That Don’t Add Value

Ever since you’ve launched your affiliate program, your goal has been to recruit affiliates. But are you taking the time to screen your affiliate applications and analytics reports for signs of affiliate marketing parasitism and other activities that could harm your program? According to BI Intelligence, affiliate marketing accounts for […]

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Affiliate Toolbars, Adware and Malware: 19 Resources to Study

You will hear them called “adware,” “malware,” “parasiteware,” and “spyware;” you will see them come in forms of toolbars, browser plugins, BHOs, pop-ups, and pop-unders. As Harvard’s Ben Edelman would say, “the techniques vary, but the key tactic is the same” — “finding a way to get between the user and the

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How Rogue Affiliates Use Fiverr To Swindle Pay-Per-Lead Programs

Let me start by saying that Fiverr is a great platform used by multiple upright affiliate marketers on a multitude of reasons. Some are finding affordable help (copywriters, web designers, coders, video production services, etc), others are earning money with Fiverr’s own affiliate program, but the group to which I

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Per Convertro One in Ten of Your Affiliates is Likely a Cookie Stuffer

It’s been 16 months since Convertro released their “Affiliate Cookie Stuffing 2.0” report revealing their list of the top 10 cookie stuffers to be aware of. Looking for more up-to-date information on the subject, I was pleasantly surprised to learn the company’s co-founder and CMO, David Perez, actually has substantial

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An Invisible Thief: Affiliate Adware and Plugins

The best affiliates are highly motivated to make sales and use whatever tools available to interest potential customers, including ever-developing technologies and apps. Although this is generally a good thing for the merchant, affiliate managers must be discerning which promotional methods are acceptable and which are not. Several types of

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Surprising Example of (Toolbar) Affiliate Transparency

Yesterday, when blogging about the importance of affiliate-merchant transparency (and setting the right merchants’ expectations right from the start of affiliate’s relationships with merchants) I had no clue that on the very next day I will have to put together a “Part 2” in continuation of that post. Today a

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BrandVerity's PoachMark Now Also Analyzes Affiliate Toolbars

Earlier this week an email came from BrandVerity, the developers of PoachMark, a famous tool of catching paid search violations. The email read: We’re happy to unveil a great new resource available to all Poachmark customers, at no additional cost! Our staff has been hard at work developing informational Affiliate

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Major Online Forums Hacked by Affiliate Cookie-Stuffers

Two days ago, a famous affiliate abuse and click fraud detective Ben Edelman (see my recent Econsultancy interview with him here), has revealed some alarming data on “hack-based cookie-stuffing” by rogue affiliates via a fairly new Bannertracker-script at online forums based on vBulletin (versions 4.x to 4.1.2). Here’s an abstract from

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Case Study on Affiliate Brand Abuse in PPC (SEM) Channel

Earlier this month @SMNWebcasts tweeted: Naturally, I was among the first folks to request the whitepaper; but only now I’ve finally found time to blog about it. The case study starts by quoting some sobering statistics from an analysis by Artinsic Interactive of “hundreds of advertisers”: There are no hard

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Paxfire or How ISPs Hijack Traffic and Affiliate Commissions

On Monday, August 8, Pace Lattin of Performance Marketing Insider has drawn the industry’s attention to a lawsuit filed by Reese Richman LLP, the subject of which is “questionable and possibly illegal behavior … by hijacking search queries.” Pace wrote: Using a technology by Paxfire, supposedly DNS redirects from searches

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